Cui bono?

Capitalism vs. socialism framework is not very useful because it obscures more than it explains. It focuses on salient but superficial differences while ignoring far reaching similarities. It is like the Anglican Church vs. Catholic Church clash. It is a quarrel who is the boss – the hereditary monarch of England vs. the guy elected by the College of Cardinals. Beyond that, it is hard to tell the difference between the two. Likewise, the capitalism vs. socialism debate focused on who the boss is – the government in London or Washington vs. the government in Moscow or Beijing while ignoring far reaching similarities of economic institutions.

The core economic institution shared by all modern countries is bureaucracy. Max Weber defined bureaucracy as a form of hierarchical organization in which formal rational rules set the organizations’ structure or lines of authority, the area of activity or goals, division of labor and the roles and qualification requirements of individuals engaged in organization’s activities. “Formal” means that the rules are written and fixed, rather than being made ad hoc by individuals. “Rational” means that the rules are optimized to achieve organization’s objectives in the most efficient way.

While early forms of bureaucracy appeared in ancient Egypt, Rome and China, bureaucracy became the dominant organizational form of government and economy only recently, with the advent of industrialization. Key factors responsible for the growth of bureaucracy were the advances in science and technology, which allowed more effective communication and transportation systems. As bureaucratic organization expanded to the economy, it allowed more efficient production and distribution of resources, which in turn unleashed industrial revolution that led to even greater advances in science and technology.

Indeed, the history of modernization and industrialization is the history of bureaucratization, the most effective, if not efficient, organizational from created by humankind. There is no viable alternative to bureaucracy – insufficient bureaucratization of the economy invariably means economic backwardness and under-development. What is popularly perceived as “communism” in countries like Russia or China was in fact a program of rapid bureaucratization of backward rural economies. In practical terms, governments of these countries were creating the same forms of economic organization as those found in the more developed countries of Western Europe and the United States – the bureaucratic corporation. Political rhetoric, by contrast, served similar purpose as the anti-papist rhetoric of the Church of England – to exaggerate differences and establish the legitimacy of the new bosses (the King of England, the government in Moscow or Beijing) and delegitimize the old bosses (the Pope and the government in London or Washington).

Although there has never been an alternative to bureaucracy, there are alternative versions of bureaucratic governance. While bureaucracies are inherently hierarchical and cannot be otherwise without ceasing to be bureaucracies, they differ in their goals and operational rules. Those goals can be broad, serving an entire population, or narrow, serving a very small group of people. The operational rules can concentrate decision-making authority at the top of the organizational hierarchy or distribute it throughout that hierarchy.

The bone of contention is not, and has never been, bureaucracy vs. supposedly alternative to bureaucracy forms of economic organization, as no such viable forms exist, anarchists and libertarians notwithstanding. The bone of contention is about the goals and leadership of bureaucracy, which boils down to the question cui bono? The few or the many?

Donald the Terrible Show

Liberals are clueless about Trump and they will likely wake up with their hand in a chamber pot on November 5, 2020.  They see Trump as a fanatical right winger, Hitler incarnate, and believe that this will drive voters to a reasonable centrist technocrat, like Biden, Buttigieg or even Warren.  My bet is that Trump will win in 2020 unless liberal Democrats do the unthinkable – embrace Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate.

I make this bet not because I am a strong Bernie’s supporter who is attracted to his program and makes regular $27 contributions to his campaign.  In fact, I have no illusions that his signature initiatives, M4A and GND, will be signed into law in the foreseeable future.  I even doubt whether M4A and GND are what most Americans really want.  But this is precisely why I believe that only Bernie has a real chance of beating Trump in 2020. 

If this sounds absurd to liberal pundits and their audiences, it is because they are looking at Trump through a wrong set of lenses.  Theirs are the lenses of a conventional political popularity contest, whose goal is to attract voters by appealing to their lowest common denominator, or views that are shared by most and detested by fewest. Ideas like patriotism, motherhood, professionalism, folksiness, and conventional likeability.  In the view projected by these lenses, the most liked and least detested candidate wins.  Hence the constant polling trying to gauge how candidates score on likeability scales.

Pondering whether such lenses are useful for predicting winners of elections is generally a wild goose chase, because such predictions are either self-fulfilling prophecies or tautologies.  Pundits have no way of knowing who the public likes or dislikes.  They can either turn their opinions on that matter into self-fulfilling prophecies by bamboozling the public into liking or disliking candidates through media appeals, or into a tautology – a candidate who won must have been the one who was most liked and least disliked.  Such views are true by definition or convention, and it is nearly impossible to disprove them.

The 2016 provided a unique opportunity to disprove this conventional wisdom, because the most disliked candidate, Donald Trump, won the election instead of losing it, as pundits said he would.  To a critical thinker, this should be a sign that conventional wisdom is either altogether wrong or at least does not apply to Trump.  Yet the liberal pundits missed that clue by a mile and doubled down on the conventional wisdom.

I realized that Trump is a different kind of a player than a conventional American politician during his first debate with Hillary Clinton.  “Debate” is a misnomer here.  These events are theatrical spectacles in which the performers adhere to strictly scripted roles projecting über-conventional images of a successful American politician – patriotic, folksy, honest, good-natured, poised, fair, quick witted but not too brainy, and physically fit. Trump ostensibly broke this character – he was physically menacing, threatening, crafty, cunning, mean, arrogant and very un-gentleman like.  Despite the punditry almost unanimously proclaiming him a “loser” I realized that this guy was playing a very different game, one appealing not to pundits but directly to the segment of the public that his “most qualified ever” opponent labeled “deplorables” in her infinite wisdom.  And since pundits are few and deplorables are many, I thought it was Trump who actually won that debate. 

This connection between Trump’s “debate” role and the intended audience was prompted by a video clip I saw earlier on the Facebook, showing Trump treacherously sucker-punching from behind his opponent at a professional wrestling show.  The obvious intention of the clip was to discredit Trump, portray him as an unrefined brute and a clown unfit for the dignified role of the President of the United States.  It was an obvious smear effort launched by Trump’s opponents, akin to many such campaigns launched by Republican operatives against Democratic candidates (Willie Horton, Gary Hart on Monkey Business, Swift Boat Captains, etc.).  But why would Trump willingly embrace such ostensibly unfavorable character himself during the “debate?”

Like most members of the American literati class, I do not watch professional wrestling shows.  My knowledge of the genre comes mainly from my interest in cognitive sociology, specifically the seminal book by French literary theorist Roland Barthes “Mythologies” published in 1957, in which he explores social aspects of communication.  The central concept of Barthes’ analysis is “myth” or a communicative device that consists of two layers of meaning, the concrete meaning grounded in the sensual perception of physical attributes of objects, and abstract meaning grounded in the perception of social significance of that object.  For example, an article of clothing is perceived at the first, concrete, level as an object with various, physical attributes, such shape, color, pattern, etc. On the second, abstract, level the same garment also symbolizes the “dress code” i.e. social circumstance and social status of the person who wears it.  In a well-constructed myth, the physical attributes of the object embody the abstract social meaning – the very shape, color and pattern of the garment clearly signal the social occasion and the status of the person who wears it, eg. blue collar vs. white collar worker, guests vs. servers or ushers, physicians vs. medics, vs. patients, business professional vs. service worker etc.

One of the popular myth systems explored by Barthes was wrestling, known as “professional wrestling” in the US.  Professional wrestling is a spectacle of staged fights between two cartoonish characters representing moral virtues of good and evil.  The key to a successful wrestling spectacle is that the physical features and gestures of the actors must clearly and unambiguously embody the moral virtue they play. Thus, to quote Barthes (p.17):

“[…] each physical type expresses to excel the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Tahuvin, a fifty year old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nickname, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of salaud, the ‘bastard’ (the key concept of any wrestling match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of sign: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but I addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter […].

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest.  I know from the start that all Thauvin’s actions, his treacheries, cruelties, acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard –octopus.  Wrestlers therefore have a physique peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’ Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts, just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor […]”

After watching the video clip posted on Facebook by his detractors, and watching his performance in his “debate” with Clinton, it dawned on me that Trump plays a very different character than one that the pundit class expects of a conventional politician – the  “bastard” character from a professional wrestling show instead of one of the “most electable” American politician.  It is rather obvious for anyone willing to open his eyes and see that no person, no matter how tone deaf, can inadvertently commit so many obvious blunders as Trump did during his presidential campaign.  There must be a method to this madness, and this method is turning a trite and boring spectacle of staged presidential “debates” into a professional wrestling show.  I am of course not the only one who made this observation.  Matt Taibbi devotes an entire chapter of his book “Hate, Inc.” to draw an analogy between Trump’s behavior and professional wrestling shows.

However, most of the liberal echo chamber missed this rather obvious conclusion by a mile.  They still think that it is the most electable American politician show and double down on bombarding the public with a barrage of examples how horrible a character Trump is.  The Democratic party establishment, never a thought leader and always sheepishly following conventional wisdom, followed the suit by starting impeachment proceeding against Trump for alleged treason, knowing darn well that the chances of him being actually removed from office are smaller than passing a M4A law. 

All those “character assassination” attempts play right into the role of Trump playing the “bastard” in a professional wrestling show.  Far from hurting Trump, they reinforce public perceptions that Trump is well in character of the “bastard” and will reward him for good performance with four more years in office.  On the surface, this sounds paradoxical.  Why would the audience reward a vile and despised character? Do not they expect the good guy beating the bad guy at the end?

They do, but only if the good guy enters the stage and joins the fray.  So far, however, no good guy is on the stage.  The audience rooted for Trump in 2016 because he was the bastard beating up even bigger villains, “Crooked Hillary” and Washington “swamp critters.”  They did it, because they had nothing to lose, but they could score a symbolic victory against those who, in their view, spat in their faces for too long – the political establishment. American politics ceased to have any meaningful relationship to the lives of ordinary people long time ago and instead became a theatrical spectacle and a farce of democracy.  It is not that political decisions do not affect lives of ordinary people, but that they are handed down by technocratic elites as done deals and, in the words of the German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, ‘elections change nothing.’  In the United States, elections, especially national elections, became a trite and boring theatrical spectacle of “electability.”  Sending a villain from a professional wrestling show to Washington was the American public’s way of throwing rotten tomatoes at bad actors in a bad show.  It is not that it would change anything, but seeing the despised critters run at least offered the spectators a sense of schadenfreude.

Trump has not broken the bastard character while in office.  This is particularly evident in his treatment of immigration.  The Obama administration implemented massive deportations program that reported nearly 3 million people, earning Obama the title “The deporter in chief.”  Trump’s administration deported far fewer people in total and on a per year basis. .  However, while the Obama administration deported people quietly, without much publicity, Trump brought deportations to the center of public attention, which flooded the media with images of countless adults and children suffering in the US custody.

Why would the president deliberately bring such negative publicity to his administration?  A president concerned with maintaining a “nice guy” image, like Obama, certainly would not, but Trump plays the role of the bastard from a professional wrestling spectacle, and public inflicting of suffering is in character.  Here is Roland Barthes again (p. 19)

“What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice.  Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks.  The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by intolerable affliction {…} This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular {…} Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood {…} suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers.  What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one’s mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering.  The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions […]”

That this is a spectacle for public consumption becomes evident when we juxtapose it with Trump’s decision to call off air strikes on Iranian radar facilities in retaliation for drowning an American drone.  The justification Trump gave for his decision was excessive number casualties such attack would produce.  This shows Trump willingness to orchestrate a show of pain and suffering, but backing off actions actually inflicting new pain and suffering. 

This, of course does not imply that the suffering of people detained and deported is not real, but that such suffering is merely a byproduct of the normal functioning of the American state and its cherished institutions rather than a sadistic act of the president or other government officials.  America incarcerates, detains and deports more people than only other country in the world and created a vast prison-industrial complex to perform this task thoroughly and efficiently.  This process is designed to punish, that is, inflict suffering on the incarcerated persons, but by extension, on their families and communities.  No government official, including the President, can alleviate this suffering without dismantling the institutional apparatus that produces this suffering.  All he can do is to either cover this suffering up or expose it to public view.  By contrast, ordering a military strike rests solely within the purview of presidential discretion, so the suffering such an action may produce hinges on presidential fiat.  Trump showed no hesitation to publicly reveal suffering already inflicted by the American carceral state, but stopped short of actually inflicting new suffering by the means of discretionary military action.

This apparent paradox reveals the true nature of Trump’s presidency – it is all about a spectacle portraying him as the meanest ass-kicking bastard in town, rather than about the business of governing.  He is an entertainer, a mountebank, a con artist if you will, not a politician in any conventional sense, let alone an incarnation of Hitler. Here is Roland Barthes (p.20):

“But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography.  It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.”

Trump perfected the mean ass-kicking bastard role in his television shows and expertly plays it in the circus spectacle that has become of the American presidential elections.  It is all spectacle because ‘elections change nothing’, but it is a very different kind of spectacle than that delivered by the American political establishment.  Instead of a spectacle in which cartoonish characters mull bromides signaling their “likeability” and “electability”, Trump’s spectacle is the one in which the prize goes to the meanest ass-kicking bastard in town.

Without doubt, the professional managerial class and media pundits are disgusted with Trump’s spectacle and are anxious to return to business as usual: technocrats handing down political decisions benefiting corporations, and elections limited to bromide slogans parroted by hand-picked by political party bosses politicians.  However, the managed classes, the “deplorables” seem to enjoy the Trumps’ spectacle, if only to see the pundit class and the “liberal elite” royally pissed.  This is what the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson called politics of total retribution of people who have been relegated to the sewers of society and whose only chance of getting respect is to poop on the party of the elites.  To quote SusanMcWilliams (The Nation, December 15, 2016)

“rather than gracefully accepting their place as losers in an increasingly technical, intellectual, global, inclusive, progressive American society, [they] stuck up their fingers at the whole enterprise. If you can’t win, you can at least scare the bejeesus out of the guy wearing the medal. You might not beat him, but you can make him pay attention to you. You can haunt him, make him worry that you’re going to steal into his daughter’s bedroom in the darkest night and have your way with her—and that she might actually like it.”

The “bastard in the White House” game is sticking up the middle finger at the Washington establishment and it is likely to continue into 2020.  The only way to beat that bastard is to play the same game he is playing, the professional wrestling spectacle, and remain true to its character.  Who among the Democratic prospects will best play this role without breaking the character?

It is hard to imagine wonky Buttigieg playing the role of a mean badass taking on Trump. He may impress limousine liberals and NPR types, but he has zero appeal to the minorities and the left behind managed classes, especially those enjoying Trump’s spectacle.  Neither does speaking on both sides of his mouth Joe Biden who promises to cut deals with the other team behind your back but cannot refrain from tripping over his own shoelaces in public appearances.  Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for everything, but the clout to change nothing, which poorly suits her for the hero role in the presidential wrestling spectacle.  Like Buttigieg, she may impress policy wonks and professional managerial classes, but not the managed classes whose support is essential for winning the election.

 

The only candidate who may successfully take on the meanest ass-kicking bastard inside the beltway is Bernie Sanders. Unlike most Democratic Party apparatchiks, Sanders is a straight shooting never wavering character from the myth of politics as it ought to be (but never was). His promise to beat the crap out of billionaires who stole or democracy and bring back good things to life, M4A, free college and good union jobs, is well suited for the genre.  It promises a titanic struggle against evil forces, and rewards when the struggle is over.  The rewards are akin to the 70 virgins awaiting jihadists in heaven, enticing but elusive, so each warrior can fill that promise in with details of his desire. 

And this is precisely Sanders’ strength.  He promises a quest, not a laundry list of “achievable” goals cooked up by political consultants and DNC hacks.  Unlike Warren’s plans, whose details provide ammunition to the detractors to undermine them, Sanders’ proposal can only be accepted or rejected as a whole, thus further signaling the inevitability of the titanic battle that it promises.  Either way, Sanders’ message is reinforced and made even more appealing to the mobs of spectators enjoying the Trump’s show. This kind of spectacle may be repulsive to the professional managerial class, but they better hold their refined noses and embrace it or else they will wake up to four more years of Trumps’ meanest bastard in the beltway show.

The myth of higher education

Imagine going to a doctor’s office and the receptionist telling you “The doctor cannot see you until you pass a test showing that you are in good health.”  It is of course absurd on its face, but like with most obvious things, it is worth pointing out why.  It is absurd because it is a vicious circle or “catch 22” –reasoning taking the form “to have A you must have B, but you cannot have B without having A.”

Yet, the absurdity of this vicious circle fallacy all but disappears when it comes to education.  You cannot be admitted to a university unless you pass a test showing that you have “scholastic aptitude” which in plain English means that you are already educated.  That college entrance exams are not seen as a “catch 22” absurdity can mean only one thing –that the role of universities is to provide not education but something else that requires education.  That “something” is credentials or a glorified letter of recommendation saying that the bearer is worth admitting to a club that excludes mot other people.

The idea that the main social function of universities is dispensation of credentials on which social inequalities are built is, of course, not new.  It has been well documented in research (see for example Randall Collins, “The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification”).  Less clear is the idea that colleges do not provide education, but rather use it as a material to create their final product – credentials- for which they take credit and charge a hefty price.

To use the medical analogy again, the role of the school is not that of a doctor but that of a midwife.  The role of the doctor is to take a patient who lost his natural state – health – and return him to that natural state.  By contrast, the role of the midwife is to merely assist what she can already do naturally – give birth.  In fact, if the patient could not give birth naturally, this situation would call for a doctor rather than a midwife. 

Likewise, universities merely assist people who have “scholastic aptitude,” that is, who are already educated in finding a path that leads them to socially prestigious or desirable jobs.  To perform this function, they need to make sure that their students already have education, because they need it but they cannot create it themselves, just like midwives cannot bring sick patients back to health.  This is also what fundamentally sets apart universities and similar institutions of “higher” education, from primary and secondary educational institutions, which actually help their students to acquire education rather than leeching on the education they already have to sell their products.  This is evidenced, among other, by the fact that primary and secondary education institutions do not require “aptitude” tests as an admission requirement, like most universities do. 

Virtually all people, save those with congenital brain defects, are naturally born with a “scholastic aptitude” that is, the capacity to learn, examine facts, communicate, and think.  This capacity is first manifested by learning a language, by far, the most complex and intricate system of thought invented by humans.  Learning a language is by far the biggest and most fundamental human task without which no further education would be possible.  Yet virtually all people accomplish this task mostly on their own, without help from any “educational institutions,” at least initially.  However, the learning of a language is a very lengthy process that is contingent on the development of cognitive capacities that for humans take about 16 years. 

This is where the primary and secondary educational institutions fit in.  Human language is an extensive and complex creation.  Acquisition of it requires constant practice and by that virtue, a lot of time and a fair amount of help from fellow humans.  Here is where the primary and secondary educational institutions come in.  Their role is to act as a midwife in the language acquisition process.  They fulfill that role by setting aside a block of time dedicated primarily for practicing cognitive tasks necessary for language acquisition, by creating a safe space that shelters the students from outside interruptions, and by providing role models (teachers) for students to emulate. 

The distinction between primary and secondary institutions in this context is mostly arbitrary, rooted in institutional administration and competition that schools faces with societal demands for child labor.  Historically, primary institutions were for all children while secondary institutions only for those children who did not face urgent demand for their labor.  But form a cognitive point of view the services provided by both types of schools were closely tied to the development of cognitive capacities in the human child, which reached the full potential in the late adolescence.  The service these institutions provide aim at aiding a natural development process with something that learners may not be able to get on their own – opportunity and safe and enriching environment.  This is why these institutions generally eschew any “admission tests” and rely mainly on diagnostic testing aiming potential deficiencies in acquiring necessary skills.  

Any cognitive differences that emerge during this process are due largely to external circumstances that affect the student learning.  This predominantly takes the form of parental influence that makes all the difference in the world – sometimes by providing nurturing learning environment, but by far more often, by royally screwing up children in one way or another, e.g. by abandon and neglect or by turning them into hypercompetitive psychopaths.  Parents are often child’s worst enemy as far education is concerned. Social environment is another factor.  If most people around you are teachers, doctors or engineers you want to learn to be like them.  If otoh most are petty crooks, hookers and drug dealers, you do not need any education be one of those.

That changes rather dramatically in the tertiary educational institutions aka universities.  Unlike other types of schools, universities provide services to adults who, form a biological point of view, have fully formed cognitive capacities.  Therefore, the type of education these institutions provide serve a rather different function – the acquisition of highly specialized jargon used by esoteric groups and cults.  Initially, universities served organized religion by training its clergy in in the arcane sophistries of theological speculation.  Later, they became finishing schools for the children of aristocracy and wealthy businessmen, teaching them proper manners and forms of talk before they assumed the role of managing their family estates. 

However, in the 19^th century that role changed and universities were expected to educate their students in the arcana of scientific knowledge.  This change came with the emergence of professions, such as medicine or engineering, whose claim to jurisdiction over certain types of economic activity rested on possessing a certain type of scientific knowledge.  What set the professional apart from the medieval guilds was that skills possessed by guild members were transmitted from other members of that guild, and thus were specific to that guild, whereas knowledge claimed by the professions was universal and independent of profession membership (cf. Andrew Abbott, “The System of Professions”).  While the guild system of knowledge transmission was very effective in maintaining the guild monopoly for that knowledge, it also had inherently limited capacity of transmitting that knowledge to areas beyond the guild control.  This was a fatal weakness in the area of capitalist expansion to wide geographical areas.  The universal knowledge claimed by the professions, by contrast, was easily transferable across different areas, but to be truly universal, this knowledge had to be produced outside the system of professions.

In this context, universities assumed the role of transmission and production of such scientific role.  In the United States, this new function was introduced by the Johns Hopkins University in 1876 that, unlike the New England finishing schools for business aristocracy and clergy, integrated education and scientific research based on the German model.  But this model was quickly adopted by other institutions, as the demand for scientific knowledge fueled by the development of professions grew.  Alas, the university produced scientific knowledge faced one problem from the professional practice point of view.   It was universal, and thus open the entry to the professions to anyone who possessed it.  The professions initially solved this problem by following the guild example, by creating a credential system, administered by professional associations and later by the state, as a requirement for practicing a profession.

Universities developed their own credentialing system as well, in form of admission tests.  The problem they faced in this task was that those tests could not simply test general knowledge, because they would not sufficiently discriminate between those select few deemed worthy admitting to an exclusive club, and the rest who could also master the required general knowledge.  This problem was solved by the introduction of “scholastic aptitude” tests.  The ingenuity or perhaps turpitude of that solution was that while on surface it appeared to be an objective test of knowledge and cognitive skills, it reality it was anything but that.  To perform its discriminatory function, the “scholastic aptitude” had to produce the so-called “curve” (aka the “normal distribution” or “Bell curve”) in which the vast majority of test takes occupy the central part of the curve, and a small number of takers are in the either end of that curve.  Those test takers on the “high” end of the curve are deemed to have the “right scholastic aptitude” that makes them eligible for admission to a club from which everyone else is excluded. 

This is the genius part of this solution.  The turpitude part, like in sausage, lies in how this this thing is made.  The test is constructed in such a way that it must always produce a “curve” – if it does not – it is modified until it does.  In practice this means that the test consist of a relatively easy questions that most takers can answer, which is necessary to produce the middle part of the curve, it also introduces artificial stress in the form of short and rigidly controlled timing that makes answering all questions very difficult.  Those who can cope with this artificial stress can answer more questions and thus fall on the “high” end of the curve.  However, this is contingent on two factors – practice and knowing a few tricks and shortcuts how to answer certain questions without actually solving their underlying problems –which in turn require a lot of preparation, for which the test takers have to pay.  A lot.  

However, the “scholastic aptitude” test is not the only scam that universities practice.  A much bigger scam is what is going on for the four or so years after the select few have been admitted to these exclusive clubs.  The education these institutions provide, and for which they charge $50k or so dollars per year, can be easily acquired by most adults at evening classes at local community colleges or on line at a small fraction of the college tuition.  Most of what is going on those campuses are “finishing school activities” – learning proper manners and forms of speech and getting the right social connections.  That is all that there is to this so called “higher education.” 

In a nutshell, the main function of universities in modern society is reproduction and legitimation of social inequality.  While these institutions provide some education, in that role they act more like a midwife by helping students to educate themselves.  The prices they charge for this service, at least in the US, are an outright scam.  So if someone is trying to bribe a wrong person to get admitted to this fraudulent system, this is really trying to beat the system at its own game, by selling shit to a shyster.